Not long ago it was announced that the FreeBSD ports tree will cease exporting its Subversion repository to CVS, and subsequently any use of CVSup for updating the ports tree will be discontinued by February 28th 2013.

FreeBSD’s main source tree repository has been served by Subversion since late May 2008 with every commit done in the Subversion repository being exported to the old CVS repository, but no date has been announced when that Subversion to CVS transfer will be shut down. Stay tuned for more information.

clang is a breath of fresh air when it comes to deliver meaningful diagnostic of errors in program code. Not only is the diagnostic colourful on screen, clang also points out where in the source file changes ought to be made.

A few days ago I resurrected all my files from a desktop system I haven’t used for almost six years. Below is my implementation of secret splitting as described in Bruce Schneier’s book “Applied Cryptography, 2nd edition”.

The idea is basically: generate a random keystream, xor the plaintext with the random keystream, use separate couriers and send the random keystream and the ciphertext to the final destination using separate routes, and finally combine the random keystream with the ciphertext to recreate the plaintext. None of the couriers know which piece they are carrying.

To improve this idea would be to generate more than one random keystream, xor the keystreams and the plaintext, thus requiring more couriers and different routes for each datastream.